Art in corporate HQs: bit of a curate’s egg, in general. Except replacing “good bits and bad bits” with “bad bits and really awful bits”. There’s very rarely any kind of curatorial thought apparent in decking out the company lobby – donations, commissions and what might as well be holiday souvenirs mix queasily under a visitor’s distracted eye. A meeting at City megabank Cazenove seemed unlikely to change my mind about this. Oil portraits of bank founders looking proud and a bit bemused. A small, tacky bronze bull sculpture that had inexplicably been put on a really huge table and looked silly. And then, on the second floor, a gem – a lovely, deep blue, abstract canvas; waves upon waves of deliciously thick, tactile, grooved paint, like a swimming pool full of cake icing. I really wanted to stroke it! (I didn’t though, business is business.)
I’m in two minds about privately owned art – on the one hand I like the idea of anyone who wants being able to see good art, on the other I love the idea of bits of art being taken out of galleries and thrust into the vulgarities of daily existence, like boring meetings in banks. What does annoy me a bit though is when you see something you enjoy and can’t find out anything else about it – the painting hung unlabelled and anonymous. Nobody knew anything about it – it was just decoration I suppose, not even ‘art’ at all for the people who saw it every day. The meeting went well enough – the bank serves very nice biscuits with its coffee. I took a look at the blue painting on the way out, and that was that.